Humans Wanted
edited by Vivian Caethe
authors: Jody Lynn Nye, A. Merc Rustard, Alex Acks, Marie DesJardin, Eneasz Brodski, J.A. Campbell, Sydney Seay, Richard A. Becker, Gwendolynn Thomas, Mariah Southworth, Alex Pearl, & Amelia Kibbie
2017
I was very excited to discover this book existed and bought it for my kindle as soon as I realized it was a thing. Sadly, I think I went in to it with my expectations a bit too high. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that these stories read like classic silver age scifi stories. I can certainly enjoy classic science fiction, but the premise of the book is that it was inspired by a tumblr post that I’d actually run across before this book was ever published.
And that tumblr post is hilarious. It’s also just one part of a whole tumblr conversation / meme that is also hilarious and joyful, asking the questions: what if humans are the weird ones? Like just not the galactic norm at all in really weird ways? what if we’re space orcs? What if we’re the hold-my-beer species? What if our weirdness is that we form bonds with everything (family, friends, aliens, space ships, weapons, etc.)?
There’s just a spirit of joyful insanity in the online discussion that didn’t come through in the stories in this book which tend more towards the nostalgic melancholy. These stories are definitely doing interesting things and well-worth the read, but are missing a lot of the millennial-era absurdist humor that I’d expected given the premise.
So instead of the professionally written, edited, and formatted stories in this book, I recommend reading some of the amateur-written, spontaneously collaborative, mini stories that you can find posted online, of which I have included a handful of links below:
Unnamed ficlet(s) about the human desire to bond
The Gentlemen of Fortune club stories
Unnamed ficlet(s) about terraforming (but keeping the fun bits of the location)
Biblio-therapy 